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Mary Buchanan and James McIntyre Award Winner
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It is a great pleasure to announce that Elizabeth Thompson has won the Mary Buchanan Award for Unintentional Humour in Canadian Poetry for "Follies of To-day" by Mary Jemima MacColl (1847—?). A poem that unabashedly celebrates contemporary advances in female rights by calling for a male backlash, "Follies of To-day" made its bibliographical debut in Bide a Wee, and Other Poems, a volume first published in 1880 by Peter Paul in Buffalo and oportunistically reprinted two years later by the Rose Publishing Company in Toronto. In both printings, MacColl’s volume is prefaced by a Dedication that speaks as eloquently of her compositional circumstances as of her [*illegible word on mansucript*] with patriachal society: I offer these Poems to an indulgent public, feeling deeply their incompleteness in every respect. They have been written hastily, at intervals, under circumstances far from favourable to the clothing of poetic thoughts in a fitting garb. I dedicate them, with fond affection, to my dear Father, from whom I have inherited what little poetic feeling they may display. MJM Here, indeed, is writing in the father’s house—the self-effacing utterance of a female imagination that has internalized the "fitting garb" of patriarchy and accepted the constriction of female identity to which the diminutive names of the first three stanzas of "Follies of To-day" return with a repetitiveness that would be almost pathological in its intensity if it were not so rollicking in its rhythm. In "Follies of To-day" the madwoman in the attic sports the "garb" of the New Woman, the female poet accepts the role of proper lady, "Mary . . . is Mate." Although the richness of "Follies of To-day" hass not hitherto been fully appreciated, a mere sampling of the accolades assembled under the heading of "Complimentary" in the Toronto edition of Bide a Wee, and Other Poems attests to the high esteem in which MacColl was held in her own day, both in Canada and in the United States: Your little volume is full of poetic beauty and deep feeling. Henry W. Longfellow. ‘Bide a Wee’ contains a chaste and graceful collection of poems which do credit to the heart and intellect of the author. John G. Whittier. Your little book confirmed all my favourable impressions. I found your poems truthful and melodious. Oliver Wendell Holmes. The imagery of Miss MacColl’s poetry is surpassingly good. Hamilton (Ont.) Spectator. It is an irony explicable only by the enduring hold of patriarchy on the Canadian academic institution that, while Bide a Wee, and Other Poems has languished in almost complete obscurity, another volume of poetry first published in the same year, Orion, and Other Poems by Charles G. D. Roberts, has come to be regarded as the harbinger of the Confederation era in Canadian poetry. Is it vain to hope that, with the re-publication of "Follies of To-day," the work of Mary Jaemima MacColl will once again receive the recognition that it deserves? If so, Elizabeth Thompson will have earned the profound gratitude of all students of Canadian literature, and the Mary Buchanan and James McIntyre Award fulfilled the purpose for which it was intended. FOLLIES OF TO-DAY Reprinted from Marry Jemima MacColl, Bide a Wee, and Other Poems (Toronto: Rose Publishing Company, 1882), pp. 96-97. |
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